Former Chicago ACORN Official funded with $445 million by Obama Administration

The man who once ran the Chicago housing programs for ACORN, the notoriously corrupt, scandalous community organization, is now the director of a new Illinois housing assistance program funded with $445 million by the White House. In the Obama Administration waste, fraud, abuse, and corruption aren't rooted out – they get repackaged and rewarded with a huge budget increase.

Remember the outrage over the exposure of ACORN travesties including voter fraud and offering advice on tax evasion that led to Congress overwhelmingly voting to defund the scandal plagued organization (345-71 in the House, 85-11 in the Senate)?

Less salacious, but far more economically disastrous was the "starring role" that ACORN played in precipitating the financial meltdown of 2008 initiated by the sub-prime mortgage market meltdown. According to acclaimed investigative journalist Matthew Vadum, ACORN's "wanton disregard for the economic wellbeing of America" through the very direct involvement for decades in federal housing policy and programs at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, perpetually weakening underwriting standards, and ignoring or even falsifying loan documentation put ACORN squarely at the center of the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage house of cards.

Huge numbers of loans that eventually became the problem trace to ACORN originations. Vadum discovered that ACORN housing brochures openly bragged about how they undermined mortgage loan underwriting standards.

Joe McGavin used to be the director of counseling for ACORN housing in Chicago and operations manager for an ACORN offshoot, Affordable Housing Centers of America (ACHOA). After the scandal-ridden collapse of ACORN, McGavin resurfaced in 2011 as the new director of the Illinois Hardest Hit Program. The Hardest Hit Fund (HHF) is one of many programs established by the Obama Administration to "assist homeowners who have experienced an income reduction due to unemployment or substantial underemployment" during the economic recession.

Judicial Watch, the non-partisan Washington based watchdog foundation, discovered that McGavin and IHHF will now be in charge of doling out $445 million thanks to a very generous grant by the Obama Administration. "It means the ACORN official (Joe McGavin) will go from operating a corrupt leftist community group that's banned by Congress from receiving federal funding to controlling over $445 million in U.S. taxpayer funds," says Judicial Watch in a newly released report. Being remarkably polite, JW opined that McGavin's "strong ties to ACORN make him a suspect candidate to handle such a huge amount of taxpayer dollars."

McGavin and other ACORN alumni and radical leftists know they have the godfather of all Community Organizers in the Oval Office, and Obama has long been in the middle of promoting the failed housing policies that led to the current crisis.

As Matthew Vadum explains, "Barack H. Obama, Esq., contributed to the increasingly hostile environment for banks when he represented the plaintiffs in the 1995 class action lawsuit Buycks-Roberson v. Citibank. The suit demanded that the bank grant mortgages to an equal percentage of minority and non-minority mortgage applicants." In a far too familiar pattern resulting from similar intimidation tactics, the bank eventually settled the case by agreeing to increase lending "to unqualified applicants."

If this scenario happened in almost any other Administration it would be scandalous, but it has become standard-operating-procedure in the Chicago-style politics of the Obama White House – the Administration that promised to "drain the swamp" of government corruption and be the most transparent in American history.

Bob Beauprez is a former Member of Congress and is currently the editor-in-chief of A Line of Sight, an online policy resource. Prior to serving in Congress, Mr. Beauprez was a dairy farmer and community banker. He and his wife Claudia reside in Lafayette, Colorado. You may contact him at: http://bobbeauprez.com/contact/

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